Scienceline

Scienceline http://www.scienceline.org The Shortest Distance Between You and Science Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:59:39 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 The Shortest Distance Between You and Science no Vital Signs http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/25/vital-signs/ http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/25/vital-signs/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:20:34 +0000 Alyson Kenward http://www.scienceline.org/?p=5111 http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/25/vital-signs/feed/ 0 Everyone becomes attuned to specific sounds that are uniquely important to them. Perhaps you’re used to waiting for the thud of the morning paper being tossed onto your front porch. Or maybe you can distinctly tell the sound of your boss’s footstep from everyone else’s, shuffling down the hallway towards your desk. We learn to listen for these sounds and train ourselves to hear them clearly over the backdrop soundtrack of everyday life. In a chemistry lab, there are many sounds a researcher needs to listen for to ensure the safety and success of their work. For five years I worked in a chemistry lab at the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, and while there I focused on developing new molecules that might someday be put to work making materials and plastics the public could use. Relying on one machine in particular to keep these molecules in good condition, I learned to listen for this machine’s sounds to tell me everything was alright — or to alert me when things were about to go very wrong. Chemicals are kept alive in a laboratory with the life support of a mechanical breathing box. What Do The Planets Sound Like? http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/22/what-do-the-planets-sound-like/ http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/22/what-do-the-planets-sound-like/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:56:02 +0000 Ferris Jabr http://www.scienceline.org/?p=5056 http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/22/what-do-the-planets-sound-like/feed/ 0 For a world-renowned composer, <a href="http://www.philipglass.com/">Philip Glass</a> is not a very good listener. On the evening of February 21, Glass joined University of California, Santa Cruz astronomer <a href="http://www.ucolick.org/%7Elaugh/">Greg Laughlin</a> at New York City’s <a href="http://www.rmanyc.org/">Rubin Museum of Art</a> for a discussion entitled “How Do We Listen to the Music of the Spheres?” — the third event in the <a href="http://www.rmanyc.org/pages/load/164">Rubin’s 2010 Brainwave series</a>, which provides a forum for communication between scientists and artists. Downstairs at the Rubin — which houses a collection of Himalayan art — about 100 people gathered in front of a stage furbished with a stylish grand piano, swanky orange lounge chairs, and a large projection screen hooked up to Laughlin’s aluminum MacBook. The evening was an opportunity for two great minds to discover where the orbits of their different disciplines overlap. Although many fascinating ideas were exchanged, Glass often tried to be the sole center of gravity in the room. Perhaps Glass did not realize how often he interrupted Laughlin only two seconds after asking him a question, claiming that he already knew what Laughlin was about to say (regardless of the audience’s curiosity). Maybe Glass let his excitement get the better of him. But how can Glass announce he’s always loved science and then spend so little time actually learning from the expert scientist sitting right next to him? In fact, the 73-year-old composer proved a very impatient listener, demonstrating an avuncular affinity for rambling narratives, half-formed ideas, and questions of such cosmic proportions that no one could easily or intelligently respond. Despite the barriers to reciprocal communication, science and art managed to find one another. Admirably, Laughlin was not content to circle Glass like a mere satellite. He made his research a major focus of the evening. And Glass responded with moments of genuine—and even patient—interest and respect, sharing insightful and humorous interpretation of Laughlin’s research. Laughlin has developed <a href="http://oklo.org/systemic-console-tutorial-1-hd-4208/">software</a> that translates mathematical models of planetary systems into sounds. Planets orbiting a star cause that star to wobble; Laughlin can plot this wobbling as both equations and audible waveforms. Using Laughlin’s software, one can compare the even tone of a stable planetary system with the <a href="http://www.oklo.org/wp-content/images/230.wav">wonky vibrato of an unstable one</a>, from which planets will be thrown with great force. “The ear can sometimes hear what looking at a graph won’t tell you,” Laughlin said. In some ways, it makes more sense to listen for the difference between a stable planetary system and an unstable one than to look for that difference in graphs. Scientists need to predict planetary behavior over many eons — a timescale that is easier to compress as sound than to squeeze into a visual representation. As one of the most influential composers of the 20th century — one who has worked on operas about astronomers Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, no less — Glass certainly agreed with Laughlin about the power of sound. But the pensive composer couldn’t keep his mind from indulging in a little philosophical wandering. “The sound becomes the incident that makes me think about the sound,” Glass said, denying the audience enough elaboration to make complete sense of the statement. “Can we imagine a giant cosmic ear?” [...] Astronomer Greg Laughlin and composer Philip Glass try to hear the "music of the spheres" at the Rubin Museum's latest Brainwave event Why Can’t You Use Cell Phones on Airplanes? http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/08/why-cant-you-use-cell-phones-on-airplanes/ http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/08/why-cant-you-use-cell-phones-on-airplanes/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:18:46 +0000 Olivia Koski http://www.scienceline.org/?p=4466 http://www.scienceline.org/2010/02/08/why-cant-you-use-cell-phones-on-airplanes/feed/ 0 Could something as harmless as a phone call actually crash a plane? Or is the pre-flight announcement to “please turn off all portable electronic devices” simply to create a sense of calm and focus for the passengers as a glistening hundred-ton hunk of metal implausibly takes off into the air? With wireless Internet now making its way onto many flights, couldn’t you technically call someone using Skype? Would anyone stop you? There are two regulatory agencies in the U.S. who have jurisdiction over cell phones on planes. They each have independent, unrelated rules about them. The <a href="http://www.fcc.gov/" target="_blank">Federal Communications Commission</a> — controller of the nation’s airwaves — bans cell phones on planes to protect cell phone towers. They simply aren’t designed to handle calls from phones traveling tens of thousands of feet in the air at hundreds of miles an hour. Traveling through the air, your phone can contact many towers at once, confusing the networks and reducing their capacity. So the FCC ban is intended to protect the wireless cellular phone infrastructure. The <a href="http://www.faa.gov/" target="_blank">Federal Aviation Administration</a> — which regulates flight safety — has safety concerns about cell phones. Because of this, they have rules against their use during takeoff and landing. It’s because of electronic interference. Cell phone interference could cause the pilot to lose contact with ground control or knock the plane off course. While the chance of this is low, the potential consequences are grave enough for the FAA to maintain a ban on all electronic devices during takeoff and landing. “If it saves one crash every decade, it’s worth doing,” said retired NASA astronaut Jay Apt. Still an active pilot, Apt was involved in a review of cell phone related safety incidents reported by pilots to the FAA. During the review the committee found cases of cell phones interfering with an airplane’s Global Positioning System, which is used for navigation. Because the GPS satellites are far away, it’s easy to lose their signal. “It’s like trying to hear someone whispering in the middle of a crowded football stadium,” Apt explained. Using your cell phone on a plane is a little like yelling right next to the person trying to hear the whisper in the stadium. All electronic devices emit electromagnetic energy. Requiring them to be turned off during takeoff and landing is like asking everyone in the crowded stadium to be quiet. While all electronic devices can interfere with aircraft equipment, cell phones pose a particular risk because they are active emitters — they transmit electromagnetic energy long distances to cell phone towers miles away. The FCC assigns cell phones their own frequency channel to ensure they won’t interfere with things like radio stations. Phones should only emit at the channel they are assigned, but energy can leak to others — like those that airplanes use to communicate with air traffic controllers or for navigation. Surprisingly, the FAA has no specific ban on cell phones once planes reach cruising altitude. Instead, they leave it up to the individual airliners to determine if they are safe, according to a <a href="http://www.dac.public.lu/documentation/circulaires/AC91211B.pdf" target="_blank">2006 advisory</a>. Safe or not, the FCC regulations prohibiting cell phone use on planes still holds. Even without the FCC ban, most commercial airliners would probably err on the safe side and prohibit use of cell phones when the wheels are up. Conducting more research on how [...] Wireless technology has improved, but the ban still holds...for now. Do Sounds From Space Reach Earth? http://www.scienceline.org/2009/12/21/do-sounds-from-space-reach-earth/ http://www.scienceline.org/2009/12/21/do-sounds-from-space-reach-earth/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:19:45 +0000 Emily Elert http://www.scienceline.org/?p=3897 http://www.scienceline.org/2009/12/21/do-sounds-from-space-reach-earth/feed/ 1 Shielded under a concrete berm in Livingston, La., the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or <a href="http://www.ligo-la.caltech.edu/">LIGO</a>, is tuned in and listening for the music of the cosmos — tunes playing within the range of human hearing. “If there was a way to take the signal and hook it into speakers, we’d be able to hear it,” says Scott Hughes, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The trick is that the signal itself is really, really hard to detect — its effect, says Hughes, is a vibration smaller than the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. This is because the noise from distant galaxies isn’t coming to us through traditional sound waves, but through a different class of energy called <a href="http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/topics/gwaves/gwaves.html">gravitational waves</a>. Gravitational waves get made by big things in the universe, like supernovae and pairs of orbiting, colliding black holes. These events send out ripples of energy in all directions, like a pebble dropped into a lake. Instead of making waves in water, however, the energy emanating from these super-dense objects produces tiny undulations in space-time itself, vibrations in the fabric of the cosmos. These vibrations, or gravitational waves, were predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1916, but they have never been directly measured. Now, scientists hope to detect them with the help of experiments like LIGO, as though listening to a cosmic drumbeat, for the first time. “What we want to do is turn on the soundtrack to the universe,” said theoretical physicist <a href="http://www.jannalevin.com/">Janna Levin</a> of Barnard College at Columbia University. “If we can listen to it, it’s like archaeology — we can mine it for details” about the history of the universe, she said. Using some of Einstein’s equations, physicists have already prepared models of what gravitational waves will <a href="http://web.mit.edu/sahughes/www/sounds.html">sound like</a> coming from various sources, like spiraling pairs of black holes or neutron stars. Scott Hughes, whose work at MIT includes modeling gravitational waves, explains that the pitch, tone, and frequency of the waves depend on how objects interact with each other. In other words, listening to these cosmic songs could tell us a lot about how huge objects like black holes form, and provide important insight into the evolution of galaxies and our universe. LIGO — one of five separate observatories on Earth designed to record gravitational waves — consists of two light beams, each five kilometers in length, set up in an L shape at right angles to each other. Passing gravitational waves will stretch one beam while compressing the other — an effect the highly sensitive instrument can translate into a distinct signal. Although LIGO can only sense gravitational waves in our own cosmic neighborhood, its planned companion in space, <a href="http://lisa.nasa.gov/">LISA</a> — the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna — would be much more sensitive, picking up waves traveling from the remotest regions of the universe. LISA is slated to launch in 2018. The last major discovery in the detection of gravitational waves came in 1974, when Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor, Jr., both of Princeton University, used a telescope to observe binary pulsars — a pair of rapidly rotating, ultra-massive neutron stars. The binary pulsars lost energy at exactly the rate predicted by general relativity — the rate they would lose energy if they were sending out gravitational waves. The work won [...] Scientists strain to hear the universe's cosmic song Needles to Ready the Body for a Baby http://www.scienceline.org/2009/11/24/needles-to-ready-the-body-for-a-baby/ http://www.scienceline.org/2009/11/24/needles-to-ready-the-body-for-a-baby/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:53:33 +0000 Shelley DuBois http://www.scienceline.org/?p=3732 http://www.scienceline.org/2009/11/24/needles-to-ready-the-body-for-a-baby/feed/ 0 Many women feel pressure to get pregnant before it’s too late. A couple of them share their stories, and their experiences using acupuncture to try to boost their fertility. Women wanting to get pregnant turn to acupuncture as an option Shelley DuBois 4:58 Shelley, DuBois, Fertility, Podcast no Treating Pets, Caring for People http://www.scienceline.org/2009/09/16/konkel-podcast-veterinarian-human-patients/ http://www.scienceline.org/2009/09/16/konkel-podcast-veterinarian-human-patients/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:25:58 +0000 Lindsey Konkel http://scienceline.org/2009/09/16/konkel-podcast-veterinarian-human-patients/ http://www.scienceline.org/2009/09/16/konkel-podcast-veterinarian-human-patients/feed/ 0 Doctor Patricia Collins is a veterinarian and co-owner of a small animal hospital in Valley Cottage, New York. As she tells us, in many respects, treating animal patients is not so different than treating human patients. Veterinary medicine isn't just about Fido and Fifi anymore. Raising Mosquitoes to Fight Malaria http://www.scienceline.org/2009/06/23/malaria-research-podcast-raising-mosquitos-nyu-parasitology-epidemic/ http://www.scienceline.org/2009/06/23/malaria-research-podcast-raising-mosquitos-nyu-parasitology-epidemic/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:35:53 +0000 Erik Ortlip http://scienceline.org/2009/06/23/malaria-research-podcast-raising-mosquitos-nyu-parasitology-epidemic/ http://www.scienceline.org/2009/06/23/malaria-research-podcast-raising-mosquitos-nyu-parasitology-epidemic/feed/ 0 Note: Originally published at www.theendofthedial.com. Related on Scienceline: A microscopic arms race may lead to <a href="http://scienceline.org/2009/03/10/health-ortlip-malaria-microorganisms-fr9000098/">a new cost effective malaria treatment</a>. New life for decades old <a href="http://scienceline.org/2009/06/01/health-joelving-malaria-vaccine/">malaria vaccine</a>. Could <a href="http://scienceline.org/2009/05/05/bio-rettner-malaria-climate-change/">climate change cause an escalation</a> in the malaria epidemic? Jean Robert Nonon raises mosquitoes at New York University, sending them across the globe for malaria research. Fishing in the Big City http://www.scienceline.org/2009/05/13/podcast-israel-east-river-fishing-pollution/ http://www.scienceline.org/2009/05/13/podcast-israel-east-river-fishing-pollution/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 05:01:56 +0000 Brett Israel http://scienceline.org/2009/05/13/podcast-israel-east-river-fishing-pollution/ http://www.scienceline.org/2009/05/13/podcast-israel-east-river-fishing-pollution/feed/ 0 Is your catch safe to eat? Cool Chemistry: Stretchy Ice Cream http://www.scienceline.org/2008/08/22/phys-mahan-stretchyicecream/ http://www.scienceline.org/2008/08/22/phys-mahan-stretchyicecream/#comments Fri, 22 Aug 2008 05:01:48 +0000 Rachel Mahan http://scienceline.org/2008/08/22/phys-mahan-stretchyicecream/ http://www.scienceline.org/2008/08/22/phys-mahan-stretchyicecream/feed/ 5 ** Editor’s Note: The staff of Scienceline is taking a short break to work on future stories. This article originally appeared July 18, 2008.** From the back of the chemistry lab comes the clanking of bowls, the beeping of a microwave and even the appreciative smacking of lips. In this back room, away from the usual laboratory paraphernalia, students from Kent Kirshenbaum’s lab and the food studies department at New York University are making ice cream. Milk and sugar are included, but because a chemistry lab is not your typical creamery, this is also not your typical ice cream. It is traditional Turkish ice cream, known as Maras dondurma. When prepared with the right ingredients and care, it becomes so elastic and pliable that Kirshenbaum says people have been photographed jumping rope with it. “It’s like pulling taffy,” he says. Kirshenbaum’s team is trying to understand what makes <a href="http://www.salon.com/wlust/feature/1998/11/17feature.html" target="_blank">this traditional dessert</a> so stretchy—whether it’s the unusual ingredients, the meticulous preparation or both. In addition to milk and sugar, it contains salep, which is ground orchid root, and often contains a flavoring called mastic, which is a dried resin harvested from trees on a tiny Greek island. The ice cream goes through a mostly human-powered process before it eventually becomes elastic. <table style="width: 210px;" border="0" align="right"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="border: 1px none ; padding: 5px; color: #ffffff; background-color: #3399cc; text-align: center"><a onclick="window.open(this.href,'window','width=825,height=610,resizable,scrollbars,toolbar,menubar');return false;" href="http://scienceline.org/_s/files/2008/07/stretchyrecipe.gif"><img src="http://scienceline.org/_s/files/2008/07/stretchy_small.gif" alt="Tilapia Genetics" /></a> <a onclick="window.open(this.href,'window','width=825,height=610,resizable,scrollbars,toolbar,menubar');return false;" href="http://scienceline.org/_s/files/2008/07/stretchyrecipe.gif">Click here</a> to see the recipe for stretchy ice cream.</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> The researchers are finding that the stretchiness depends on a combination of all these things, says Arielle Johnson, an undergraduate chemistry major who has been working on the ice cream as part of an independent study project. While mixing up different batches, she has been observing the consistency—and tasting a little here and there, of course. “Getting chem credit for cooking is pretty awesome,” Johnson says. The group also includes Richard Silver, a graduate student in Kirshenbaum’s lab, and Anne E. McBride, a graduate student in the food studies department. Kirshenbaum’s students typically study polymers, which are long molecules with repeating units (think: beaded necklaces). But polymers are <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1720049_1720050_1721651,00.html" target="_blank">not limited to labs</a>. Polymers make cornstarch a good thickener and cause gelatin to gel. “A lot of what we do when we cook is to do biochemistry on polymers,” Kirshenbaum says. The two unusual Turkish ice cream ingredients, salep and mastic, probably contribute to the ice cream’s mysterious elasticity because they both contain polymers. The main polymers in salep are glucomannans, which are chains of sugar units, and in mastic there are poly-beta-myrcene polymers. Two [...] Science and tradition meet when chemists cook up stretchy Turkish ice cream. Digging up the Past http://www.scienceline.org/2008/02/08/podcast-mahan-archaeology/ http://www.scienceline.org/2008/02/08/podcast-mahan-archaeology/#comments Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:00:25 +0000 Rachel Mahan http://scienceline.org/2008/02/08/podcast-mahan-archaeology/ http://www.scienceline.org/2008/02/08/podcast-mahan-archaeology/feed/ 8 Explore feminist archaeology. In this edition of the Sound of Science, Rita Wright talks about women in archaeology now and archaeology’s bias, until recently, toward studying men in ancient societies. She describes what it is like to work as a woman in areas like Pakistan and how her job influences her home decor. In an audio profile, archaeologist Rita Wright uncovers the status of women in the field, thousands of years ago and today.